The Court is already underway with the Notorious RGB leveraging a constitutional smack down on new Justice Neil Gorsuch in Gill v. Whitford (a/k/a the partisan gerrymandering case). Attorney Smith was answering Justice Ginsburg question on how redistricting laws created one party rule in some states. Justice Gorsuch interrupted and diverted attention away from an equal protection argument to a Republican form of government clause theory supported by constitutional textualism. Justice Gorsuch said:

“… where exactly do we get authority to revise state legislative lines? When the Constitution authorizes the federal government to step in on state – state legislative matters, it’s pretty clear. If you look at the Fifteenth Amendment, you look at the Nineteenth Amendment, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and even the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2, says Congress has the power, when state legislators don’t provide the right to vote equally, to dilute congressional representation. Aren’t those all textual indications in the Constitution itself that maybe we ought to be cautious about stepping in here?” – Gill v. Whitford transcript, page 59, courtesy of Scotus.

Justice Ginsburg intervened in the Gorsuch/Smith back and forth asking the Court: Where did one person/one vote come from? She was referring to the 1963 Reynolds v. Sims Supreme Court decision. One person/one vote was read into the Constitution by Chief Justice Earl Warren and it is not in the Constitutional document itself, upending Justice Gorsuch’s textualism argument. You can actually listen to the oral arguments on the Oyez website!

Wowza! The Supreme Court is getting ready to rock-n-roll!

I know you want to keep track of all the exciting Supreme Court happenings. Here is a short list of some of my favorite Supreme Court resources. NB: If is it marked with $$$, it indicates that this is a subscription database so you will either need a username and password, or perhaps proxy access if you are trying to open the page from off campus.

BTW, the NYT has a good article on the “new math” of gerrymandering and how you might measure the effect of redistricting using one method called the “efficiency gap.”